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Tuesday, 15 July 2014

Irish Intercontinental

WWE currently has a great opportunity to declutter their
title scene a little bit. Knowing the way the company works I don’t think
they’ll have realised it or that they’ll care about it if they have. But the
opportunity’s there regardless.

The Intercontinental championship was vacated a few weeks
ago after champion Bad News Barrett suffered an arm injury. A new champion will
be crowned at the Battleground pay-per-view in a thirty man battle royal. Yeah,
thirty. That number seems a bit high considering how few legitimately over
wrestlers are on the roster and that (apparently) nobody involved will wrestle
in a second match on the show. But that’s what they’re going for.

One of the thirty men in the match is current United
States champion Sheamus. That’s a championship that means even less than the
Intercontinental title. If either the IC or the US belt was dropped then the
remaining one would mean more. The fewer prizes there are on offer the greater
an accomplishment it is to win one.

Give Sheamus the Intercontinental championship.

I’m not a fan of former world champions winning mid-card
titles. Nor am I a fan of Sheamus. But even so I wouldn’t mind seeing ‘The
Celtic Warrior’ leave Battleground as a double champion. It would allow him to
appear on RAW the next night and officially combine the two titles, quietly
dropping the US belt after a few weeks (or then and there on RAW). Or he could
knock the US strap and the country it represents and cast it aside, providing
the spark for a heel turn.

Naturally I’d much rather see the uber-talented Cesaro or
Dolph Ziggler win the Intercontinental title. Or the recently revived Fandango.
Or the slowly catching on Bo Dallas. Any of them would be a great choice to
construct meaningful mid-card storylines around. But in Sheamus WWE has the
option to finish the tidy-up started last December with the world title
unification, and that’s something I’ve wanted to see them do for years.

Of course for the Intercontinental championship to truly
become the star-making tool it used to be more needs to be done than unifying
it with or keeping it in favour of the United States championship. It needs to
be presented as a title worth winning and wrestled for in lively matches
featuring performers people care about. But getting rid of the US title isn’t a
bad first step.